Energizing the base: What's new is old

For the past year Republicans have been wandering in the wilderness. Their major foreign policy initiative, the war in Iraq, has been judged a mistake by the majority of Americans. Their major domestic policy initiative was to get government out of the way of the profit motive, to privatize Social Security and to deregulate almost everything else. The public rejected Social Security privatization, and deregulation has led us into the worst recession since the early 1930s. Most Americans are now clear on one thing: Our government has a role to play in protecting them, and society at large, from the avarice of powerful interests operating in a laissez-faire or devil-take-the-hindmost system.

Voters delivered both the presidency and both houses of Congress to Democrats for the first time in 14 years, a clear judgment on previous policies. Neither President Obama nor congressional leaders have wasted time in setting a new course. The Republican leadership has wandered: asking what went wrong, trying to redefine their role, seeking ways to block the Democrats' agenda and eventually regain political pre-eminence.

Indeed, Republican leaders have re-found their voice, have found a way to galvanize the base. Two very different segments of the Republican leadership have found two issues to reinvigorate Republicans looking for new relevance. But what is new is really old among conservative strategies. Below-the-radar rumor mills have stirred fears that the feds will take everyone's guns away. This has been a proven ploy in the past to stir fears. The other strategy, another new/old strategy, is to stir fears of big government and government taxation.

The well-organized tax "tea parties," organized by the anti-tax foundation of former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and promoted by Fox News, gave some of the base an issue they could rally around, something to be excited about. The Republican leaders of this movement, Armey, Phil Gramm, Newt Gingrich and others, have declared that Obama is out to borrow and spend his way into uncontrollable debt and unrestrained big government.

These are among the Republicans who in 1999 wrote the bill that removed regulatory restraints on banking that had been in place since the early 1930s. This "liberated" banks, stockbrokers, and insurance companies to bring on the excesses and the financial crisis of today, and for which government spending seems the only cure.

Having said that, let's face it: A $787 billion stimulus package and a $3.5 trillion budget represent large numbers and a big deficit. These two numbers were the prime target of the "tea parties." But do they justify the hyperventilating denouncements of tax-and-spend policies?

The Obama administration has said that 95 percent of all Americans now have had their taxes reduced. This is true and many don't believe it. Most people with taxable incomes less than $250,000 have gotten reductions, although many may not have noticed. Unlike the Bush administration, which a year ago gave a lump-sum rebate that many deposited in savings, the Obama administration decided the tax benefit should come not from a rebate but by not withholding so much to begin with. Since it comes as an increase in the paycheck, people tend to spend it - an important stimulus to the economy. Many people may not have even noticed this in their paychecks.

There is a flip-side to this. These tax breaks and others account for $284 billion of the $787 billion stimulus package, 36 percent of the total. This puts the tax protesters in the curious position of protesting against tax breaks. This sets a new standard for strangeness in political protests.

But a far stranger thing occurred earlier. Strangely, there were no spending protests last year. This is much like Sherlock Holmes' curious case of the dog that didn't bark. From December 2007 through December 2008, under the Bush administration, the Federal Reserve, with a few billions from Treasury, committed $5.476 trillion trying to stem the implosion of the banking and finance system. This, in only 13 months, was a mind-boggling amount, vastly more than Obama proposes. And there were no protests.

What is going on here? The Bush administration had, and the Obama administration has, the best of intentions for pulling us out of the crisis we are in. The difference is that decisions in the Obama administration are open. The Bush administration expenditures, on the other hand, were unheralded - to put it nicely. We have no idea who the recipients were, or how the vastly larger amount of money was spent in the last year of the Bush administration. The tax protesters might wish to reconsider and refocus.

Bob Williams is a Millville rancher and a retired UCLA professor. His e-mail address is wmsranch@hughes.net.